NASA plans to launch SpaceX Crew-10 tonight to help bring the Starliner astronauts home

With favorable weather forecast at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission is set to launch at 7:49PM ET tonight. Flying into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the Dragon spacecraft, will dock with the ISS at around 6:00AM ET on March 13th.

Once its there, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will finally get a safe ride back home to Earth after being stranded aboard the ISS for nine months. Their Boeing Starliner mission that launched to the ISS on June 5th, 2024, was supposed to be just an eight-day mission, but issues like thruster failures and helium leaks made it unsafe to return to Earth using Starliner. The astronauts will now return on the Crew-9 capsule, tentatively scheduled for March 16th, 2025, along with two astronauts from the mission that launched to the ISS on September 28th, 2024

The Crew-10 mission includes NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, as well as JAXA mission specialist Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. The crew will spend several months aboard the ISS conducting experiments, research, and performing spacewalks..

You can watch today’s mission with NASA’s livestream of the Crew-10 launch.

Follow along here for all of the updates on the Crew-10 launch, as well as the return flight of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.